There is an interesting article the New York Times about the fever caused by an upcoming charity auction of some of Eric Clapton’s guitars. “Fever” is the right word apparently, because the desire for these guitars (and other once celebrity-owned fetish items) seems to be somehow socially contagious:

Fortunately, social scientists have been hard at work on the answers. After conducting experiments and interviewing guitar players and collectors, they have just published papers analyzing “celebrity contagion” and “imitative magic,” not to mention “a dynamic cyclical model of fetishization appropriate to an age of mass-production.”

One of their conclusions is that the seemingly illogical yearning for a Clapton relic, even a pseudorelic, stems from an instinct crucial to surviving disasters like the Black Death: the belief that certain properties are contagious, either in a good or a bad way. Another conclusion is that the magical thinking chronicled in “primitive” tribes will affect bids for the Clapton guitars being auctioned at Bonhams in Midtown Manhattan.

Some bidders might rationalize their purchases as good investments, or as objects that are worth having just because they provide pleasant memories and mental associations of someone they admire. But those do not seem to be the chief reasons for buying celebrity memorabilia, according to a team of psychologists at Yale.

The researchers asked people how much they would like to buy objects that had been owned by different celebrities, including popular ones like George Clooney and pariahs like Saddam Hussein. People’s affection for the celebrity did not predict how much value they assigned to the memorabilia — apparently they were not buying it primarily for the pleasant associations.

Nor were they chiefly motivated by the prospect of a profit, as the researchers discovered when they tested people’s eagerness to acquire a celebrity possession that could not be resold. That restriction made people less interested in items owned by villains, but it did not seriously dampen their enthusiasm for relics from their idols.

The most important factor seemed to be the degree of “celebrity contagion.” The Yale team found that a sweater owned by a popular celebrity became more valuable to people if they learned it had actually been worn by their idol. But if the sweater had subsequently been cleaned and sterilized, it seemed less valuable to the fans, apparently because the celebrity’s essence had somehow been removed.

“Our results suggest that physical contact with a celebrity boosts the value of an object, so people will pay extra for a guitar that Eric Clapton played, or even held in his hands,” said Paul Bloom, who did the experiments at Yale along with George E. Newman and Gil Diesendruck.

As someone who was bitten—hard—by the collecting bug, I can certainly attest to the fact that you want that personal touch. And since there have also been various points in my life where I’ve had the money to indulge my mania, I can also tell you that a “collector”—if they’ve got the bank balance necessary to cover the cost—WILL blow it ALL on the right item. Been there, done THAT… and more than once, too.

Had I not gotten married, I’d have continued such behavior probably for the rest of my life. Once I got married, it became harder to justify why I needed to spend $300 on yet another signed William Burroughs first edition! My wife beat the collector out of me!

Below, Derek & The Dominos performing “It’s Too Late” on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970: